Alum Will Papadin's Short Film to Screen at Sonoma Film Festival

SONOMA INDEX-TRIBUNE -- And there’s William Papadin, whose “Sans réponse” is included in World Cinema Shorts. An American filmmaker screening in the World Cinema Shorts program is probably down to the film being in French. The black-and-white, subtitled movie evokes pretentious art films, and Papadin specifically cites as an influence the cool auteur cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. (And, less pretentiously, he also cites “Amelie.”) But Papadin, 25, doesn’t know French, and never studied it, which gives his four-minute film its punchline. Yes, it’s a comedy, but funny as the movie is — and it’s a real LOL-sort-of funny — it is about grief. As he tells us right off the bat, over coffee at Sonoma’s Best, “I grew up here in Sonoma, attended Prestwood Elementary School, Adele Harrison Middle School, and graduated Sonoma Valley High School (class of 2010).” Despite that, Papadin hasn’t lived all his life in Sonoma. There was that period when he was a student at San Francisco State University, studying for his degree in film studies. And there were the 42 days he lived in Los Angeles, working as a production assistant on a little-known television series.